The sad news about test crciket is coming from most traditional cricketing nation – England, where for 2nd test between England & West Indies only 3000 tickets were sold in the stadium of 16000 capacity. Its contrasting to situation of T20 & IPL response. T20 is pulling crowd every where, and even IPL (India’s domestic tournament) proving crowd puller in foreign nation (South Africa) after it was shifted there for security reasons. Even ICC getting aware of it by arranging T20 world cup immediately after 2 years where as ODI worldcup which is arranged after 4 years. But nothing is done for Test Cricket’s revival.
Testing time at Riverside with tickets hard to sell
The full house is far from assured, especially for the first day’s play, for which only 3,000 tickets have been sold. At a ground with a capacity of just under 16,000, fewer than 30,000 seats have been sold for the match as a whole, around half of which are for the third day on Saturday. For the television cameramen charged with picking out densely populated areas of the ground, it could be a challenging few days.
Now it would be interesting how Ashes 2009 gets the response from the English public & viewers worldwide on Television. If Ashes also fails to make its mark, Test Cricket is soon on verge of being extinct…
Sandeep's Page 
Don’t know whether you’re interested in a view from England about this, but I don’t think it indicatesthat there is a lack of interest in watching Test Cricket. I think it suggests that the ECB have become greedy in charging far too much for Test tickets. A lot of people have financial problems here at the moment – Durham is one of the coldest places in England and there’s always going to be a good chance of rain if they have a Test Match there in early May. So there’s a lot of factors involved.
I’m fairly sure all the Ashes tests would have been sold out as soon as they went on sale (last year?).